Farmville and Online Political Campaigning in Romania

More than ever before, electoral players engage vast resources to conquer Romanian users. Being seen as a must, online campaigning gathered top creative people of the so-called “online industry” and big money were pumped to feed the machinery.

But despite the confidence shown by political marketing aficionados, one must admit the basic fact that online still has a modest spread (limited number of connections, poor command of Internet technicalities corroborated with limited number of people doing more than hi5ing, facebooking or youtubing). Also online campaigning fails to change the competition in a way or another simply because most internauts go online in order to escape all the burdens of daily living. Even with online campaigns that use jokes and pamphlets to convey political persuasive messages, they have to be REALLY good in order to overcome political partisanship and biases.

One might say that campaigning online could also benefit from exposure in classical media, but a marginal candidate could hardly expect this to happen; and even in the case of principal contenders this works only with completely outrageous and peremptory material.

So, what the connection between Farmville and this year’s presidential campaign in Romania? Maybe is the fact that people care much more about harvesting their crops than about the future of their polity? Maybe the low number of voters influenced by political gimmicks available on the Internet as compared to the number of hours the same people spend on Facebook?

Nevertheless, I strongly believe that the Internet constitutes a resource of which modern political campaigning should take advantage. Still, before expecting heroic results one should understand that, while the Internet has huge potential for communicating political offers, it only enhances previously achieved knowledge. Namely, voters follow their favorite on Twitter, Facebook or Youtube, they post comments supporting their favorite’s actions or they struggle to find out more about candidates. Though, this only helps them reinforce already internalized preferences.

Undecided voters are another story for online campaigning – it’s hard to find the right mix to bring them even remotely close to the electoral message. And even harder would be to track this.

It remains the problem of providing the user with enough motives in order to put the computer on standby and go to the polling station. By involving people in a dialogue and offering them ways to improve the current state of affairs this can happen. Nonetheless, it’s such a pity political campaigners neglect online’s interactiveness and keep on advancing boring monologues.